In an apparatus where data is to be transferred from a host to a memory, the data may be transferred in several different manners. In one example, the host may send a command to the memory (along with data to be written to the memory in the case of a write command) and the memory may execute the command without any further processing or other interaction from the host or memory. In order to accomplish this manner of data transfer, a number of different control signals may need to be provided from the host to the memory on dedicated signal lines—for example, a write enable signal, a read enable signal, an address latch enable signal, a command latch enable signal, a chip enable signal, and so forth may need to be generated by the host and provided to the memory.
In other examples, the number of control signals provided from the host to the memory (and therefore the number of signal lines between the host and the memory) may be reduced in order to simplify the interface between the host and the memory. In these examples, however, the memory may need to do additional processing on the commands and data received from the host in order to correctly read or write the memory. This manner of data transfer also allows multiple memory access requests to be sent from the host to the memory before one or more of those memory access requests are executed. The multiple memory access requests may be queued until the memory is ready to execute them, and the memory may provide ready status information to the host regarding the readiness of the memory to execute the queued memory access requests. This ready status information may be provided to the host by continuously sending the ready status information to the host in some examples, but such continuous transfer of ready status information (whether via continuous polling of the memory or via a dedicated signal line that triggers an interrupt or other action) may unnecessarily consume power and/or unnecessarily use signal lines.